The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson Page A

out her tops and skirts and dresses. Never mind that Dionne’s clothes were in need of replacing well before she’d come to Barbados, a fact that Hyacinth lamented when she and Phaedra unpacked their suitcases, asking if “wunna mother think that it’s a department store she sending you to,” ranting about the sad state of their wardrobes until Phaedra’s face flushed and she tried to snatch back a t-shirt pocked with pills and holes that her grandmother held up with one finger. Hyacinth did not tolerate rudeness from children. When Phaedra tried to wrest the t-shirt from her that evening, she pulled the little girl close and said, “I know Avril ain’t teach you to grab things from grown people. If that’s what you did in New York, you won’t do it in my house. That can’t fly in here at all.”
    Hyacinth could tell from looking at the girls when they arrived that shame was not something new to them. Each of them wore it differently, Dionne with a bravado that belied what she knew about herself and her family, which was thatneither she nor they ever had enough of what they needed. Phaedra had taken the teasing from the girls at school in Brooklyn and turned it against herself; she sometimes wondered if she wasn’t the dirty, worthless girl her classmates called her. One particularly rough week, Phaedra had to wear the same two tops to school because there was no money to go to the Laundromat. Never mind that Dionne made Phaedra take off her clothes as soon as she got home, then washed them in the bathroom sink and hung them to dry on the shower curtain rod each evening. Phaedra knew that the safest response to these kinds of assaults was silence, because although she wanted to say that at least she didn’t smell like Mercy, whom the other girls called an African booty scratcher, she knew that wouldn’t get her anywhere. As time passed that summer, Phaedra could feel herself standing taller, as if she could tap into the better parts of herself more readily in Bird Hill than she could in Brooklyn. Dionne, though, felt her armor clink into place more securely in Barbados, felt each passing day as evidence of their mother’s betrayal.
    Hyacinth learned to pick her battles with Dionne, and it was for that reason and because it was the end of the day and she was tired from Ms. Husbands’s delivery the night before, that she didn’t remark that it looked like it was time for Dionne to get some new brassieres.
    â€œGood evening,” was all Hyacinth said, looking up from her newspaper.
    â€œEvening,” Dionne huffed. She went to put the netball on the coffee table, inside the crystal bowl that never had fruit init. But then she felt Hyacinth’s eyes on her, and placed the ball on the floor.
    â€œSo, what you find yourself in the street doing this time of night?”
    â€œI was exercising.”
    â€œWell, I can see that.”
    Hyacinth watched as Dionne walked to the kitchen and then leaned over the refrigerator. The door stayed open for several minutes, the fridge light illuminating Dionne’s red, sweaty face, the sound of its motor harmonizing with the rhythm of her panting.
    â€œThere’s a plate on the stove for you,” Hyacinth said.
    â€œThanks, Gran.”
    Dionne went to unwrap the plastic from the plate and was putting the food in a saucepan to heat it up when she heard Hyacinth.
    â€œYou’re not going to bathe your skin? I bet that food would taste even better once you’re clean.”
    Dionne knew this question to be a command, and so she dragged her feet to her bedroom where she pulled her clothes off and threw them on the floor. When she was bathed and dressed, she sat down at the table with a heaping plate of cook-up rice. Dionne slammed the food into her mouth and was sucking the marrow from a chicken bone when she felt her grandmother’s eyes on her again. She put the bone down and wiped her teeth